In anticipation of the International Transpersonal Conference, which will take place from September 28 to October 1 in Prague, I had the honor of joining Joe Moore in dialogue on his podcast Psychedelics Today. We spoke about C.G. Jung’s Red Book and J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth and his Red Book of Westmarch, as well as exploring facets of transpersonal psychology, archetypal cosmology and astrology, and the participatory relationship of the imagination to the collective unconscious.

Along with millions of others across the United States, I had the great privilege of viewing the total Solar eclipse on August 21. I had traveled up to the Oregon Eclipse Symbiosis Gathering with family and friends, to witness the exact conjunction of the Moon with the Sun, a perfect alignment of two spheres in the morning sky. It would not be too much to say that the total eclipse was the most beautiful phenomenon I have ever seen, and one of the most numinous experiences I have had this lifetime.

Our viewing conditions were excellent, with only wisps of subtle cloud across the sky. As the Moon slowly but inevitably covered the face of the Sun, the surrounding light became an iridescent silver-gold—I have called the kind of eclipse luminescence “elf-light” in the past. The colors of the natural world appeared to be separating out from one another as the sunlight continued to dim. At the moment of totality, the whole sky became a deep violet twilight. White sparkling stars emerged suddenly across the darkened sky. Venus, in all its glory, burst forth like a beacon from the sky, shining near the midheaven. The coniunctio of the eclipse itself was like a black and silver rainbow flower, the Sun’s corona flaring forth in arcs of energy around the dark face of the Moon.

I felt as though I was witnessing a cosmic, tantric marriage, that something so much greater than any of us human beings could conceive of was taking place before us. It felt as though the symbolic, archetypal, spiritual realm had merged fully with the physical realm, and we were living in both conjoined worlds for the two minutes of totality. I pray that I may see a total eclipse again, and will likely become an eclipse chaser to continue bearing witness to such a profound sight. Nothing I have encountered is comparable to it.

The day before the eclipse my father, Rick Tarnas, and I gave a dialogue on the Solar and Lunar archetypes, and their complex relationship to each other and to the feminine and masculine polarity and spectrum. In conversation together, we explored the ways in which we each embody these archetypes, individually and collectively, in communion with each other and in relation to the world and Earth community. Chad Harris made an audio recording of the talk, and Matt Segall kindly edited it together with photographs from the dialogue and of the eclipse itself. Many thanks to both of them for their help with this, as well as to the many PCC students and alumni who were at Symbiosis who attended the presentation!

Solar and Lunar, Feminine and Masculine
A total Solar eclipse, the exact alignment of the Sun and Moon, has often been described as a cosmic enactment of the sacred marriage, king and queen, ruler of the day and ruler of the night. Many cultures have considered the Solar as symbolizing the masculine, and the Lunar as the feminine. But can we speak of “the feminine” in ways that don’t fall into the trap of a cultural stereotype, and same with “the masculine”? How can we liberate these categories in a way that would do justice to the diverse ways we have of being male and female, and of being human? Perhaps the ancient archetypal symbols of the Sun and Moon can help open up our understanding of the deep mysteries of the feminine and masculine so we can better articulate the great social and psychological transformation of gender roles and identities in our time.

This past April, while attending the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference—hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)—I joined Michael Garfield in conversation on his podcast Future Fossils. Amidst the bustling crowds at the Oakland conference, which had a record-breaking 2,800 attendees, we discussed our current moment from an archetypal perspective. We looked at the connections between the current alignment of Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto and the configuration of those same planets in the late 1960s, and how they relate to the psychedelic renaissance we are currently witnessing unfold in the larger culture. We also looked forward to the upcoming Saturn-Pluto conjunction that will be in the sky from 2018 through 2021, as well as touching on a range of other related topics.

This year is turning out to be full of exciting opportunities for travel and speaking engagements. In two weeks’ time I will be going to the Northwest Astrology Conference in Washington state, and giving my first presentation at a regional astrology conference. The title and description of my talk is below:

Calling the Generations: Participating in Outer Planetary AlignmentsDuring major outer-planetary cycles, entire generations are born carrying the archetypal signature of that time. When these same outer planets realign in new configurations there is an archetypal resonance between the generations born with those alignments and the needs of that time. Each planetary combination offers unique gifts, and in our current era of social, ecological, and spiritual crisis each may have its significant role to play in creating a life-enhancing future.

Prior to this engagement I have a few more events coming up. In August, in alignment with the total Solar eclipse taking place on August 21, I will be co-presenting with my father, Richard Tarnas, at the Oregon Eclipse Symbiosis Gathering. In honor of the eclipse we will be speaking in dialogue about the archetypal meaning of the Sun and the Moon, and the significance of their powerful conjunction during the eclipse. This is a conversation I have wanted to have for many years, and I am delighted that we will be able to conduct it in alignment with such a dynamic cosmological event. The title and description of our dialogue is below:

Solar and Lunar, Feminine and MasculineA total Solar eclipse, the exact alignment of the Sun and Moon, has often been described as a cosmic enactment of the sacred marriage, king and queen, ruler of the day and ruler of the night. Many cultures have considered the Solar as symbolizing the masculine, and the Lunar as the feminine. But can we speak of “the feminine” in ways that don’t fall into the trap of a cultural stereotype, and same with “the masculine”? How can we liberate these categories in a way that would do justice to the diverse ways we have of being male and female, and of being human? Perhaps the ancient archetypal symbols of the Sun and Moon can help open up our understanding of the deep mysteries of the feminine and masculine so we can better articulate the great social and psychological transformation of gender roles and identities in our time.

Finally, I am honored to be presenting at the International Transpersonal Conference in Prague at the end of September this year. I will be speaking on my dissertation research on the two Red Books of C. G. Jung and J. R. R. Tolkien, focusing particularly on the imagination as a realm of participatory creativity. A number of professors, alumni, and students from the California Institute of Integral Studies will be speaking at the conference.

All of my upcoming events are posted with relevant details on my Calendar of Events, which I update regularly. There are also several confirmed engagements for 2018 which are listed there as well.

Deepest thanks to the many people who have offered their support and interest over the years, and who are helping me bring forward my scholarly and creative work from the cocoon of graduate school out into the wider world.

Iceland seems to be calling us back. My husband Matt and I traveled there for our honeymoon last October, and only six months later an opportunity has arisen for us to return. From April 26-29 we will be participating in the third annual Spirit of Humanity Forum, taking place in Reykjavik. We are going to learn about spiritual leadership in governance, and how to bring about lasting transformation in the world that enshrines love, respect, and compassion at the core of decision-making. I hope also to connect with the Professor of Folklorists at the University of Iceland, who I synchronistically met in Berkeley right after watching him speak in several documentaries on the Huldufólk, Iceland’s hidden people, who I was researching for a presentation at Esalen.

But before departing once more for Iceland’s volcanic shores, we first had the opportunity to experience an outpost of Iceland’s popular art when we saw Sigur Rós play at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. I’ve always enjoyed the music of Sigur Rós, the ethereal voice of Jónsi Birgisson contrasted with the deep drum beats and guttural distortions for which the group is so well known. Yet I had a feeling that seeing them perform live would be a radically different, powerful experience—and I was right.

First I will mention that this concert took place while the Sun was aligned with the powerful Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto T-square that is shaking the world into chaos at our current moment. The Sun was in a conjunction with Uranus, bringing this highly charged and deeply revolutionary alignment into even greater focus and clarity. One would expect individual creativity to be at its peak, pushing the edges of what has previously been achieved to greater heights and extremes.

From its first notes, the full sensory experience of the concert was remarkable, sound moving through light that shifts and plays across the space like Faërian lanterns from a future world. Yet it was when Sigur Rós reached the third song of their set that I felt I could really take in what they were capable of, the new edges where art can be explored. The third song of the set is entitled “Glósóli,” from the 2005 album Takk. Paired with the release of this album, Sigur Rós crafted an enchanting yet haunting music video to illustrate “Glósóli.” The short film depicts a group of children, all dressed as though from the pages of a fairy-tale, walking together across the open Icelandic landscape.

When Sigur Rós played “Glósóli” live, the images displayed behind the musicians showed footage of Iceland’s topography, shown from the perspective of someone traversing the landscape. It was almost as though as the audience member you had become one of the children walking over the stones and hillsides of Iceland’s starkly barren regions. At the end of the original music video the children jump off a sheer cliff side, and as the viewer your understanding of what has occurred hovers for a moment in uncertainty. You may not yet comprehend what these children are really doing, until you recognize that they are able to fly, to soar above the ocean waves. In the live performance, as the musicians reach this same point in the song, the view of the footage on stage lifts off the cliff so that you as an audience member feel the sudden drop in your stomach like you too have taken flight. In this moment I could feel the intertextual dialogue being woven between the live performance and the music video, the footage shown on stage overlaid by the memory of the events unfolding in the music video. You have become one of the flying children, crossing that threshold from this realm into the next, entering into the mystery of the imaginal realm.

Yet in the music video of “Glósóli” the narrative ends there, with the final child jumping into the air. Does he keep flying? The music video leaves you uncertain. But in the live stage show Sigur Rós takes you to the beyond. The music continues, escalating into a powerful, rhythmic climax. As you soar far beyond the cliff’s edge you enter a realm of clouds, of bursting lightning, and the rolling drums of thunder. For all of us with the memory of the “Glósóli” music video echoing through our imagination, the live performance has swept us into the next stage of the story.

The themes that brought the live performance of “Glósóli” to a soaring conclusion fully carried the archetypal patterns of our current moment: the dazzling experience of breaking into a new realm that is so characteristic of the Jupiter-Uranus alignment, along with the powerful, almost overwhelming rhythms of Jupiter-Pluto, and the electronic display of lightning and thunder symbolized by Uranus-Pluto. In the dialogue between sound and light, visceral, somatic rhythm, and the blended imagery of memory and film, I felt art being pushed past a new limit.

The rest of the concert carried forward these themes, cresting again in the final song of the set. In this concluding song I felt the performers begin to channel powerful, even demonic, Plutonic energies, grasping members of the audience into its frenzied motion. The intensity of the music and the light displays continued to escalate, finally reaching a peak in which the musicians themselves faded away off the stage, and nothing but sound and light dazzled the audience, pounding the extremity of the artistic experiment into every pore of one’s senses. The thought began to creep in as the crescendo kept rising that they had pushed the entire display so far beyond the human that as the audience we might lose connection to the narrative arc of the concert if they didn’t conclude the song in some tangibly human way. Yet the song reached its final peak and cracked, coming to a sudden end—silencing the fragmenting display of technology and chaos into darkness.

I almost felt my heart fall in disappointment. They hadn’t resolved it into the human. They had chosen to go the way of spectacle and technological achievement.

And yet, following this blazing conclusion, in the subtle darkness of the stage, a single light came on and illuminated the three musicians walking forward, dressed simply in all black, linking arms affectionately as they bowed, applauding the audience as the crowd roared back in approval. I realized that they had resolved the crescendo in the human realm—by stepping forward as mere human musicians, no spectacle anymore, but purely incarnated talent. The word “takk” appeared projected at the back of the stage, the word for “thank you” in Icelandic.

Following the show I decided to explore the birth chart of Jónsi, the lead singer, and found one of the most remarkable configurations of planets I have ever seen. Each alignment in his complex chart can be seen expressed through the unique blend of styles and sounds that is Sigur Rós’s music. Jónsi was born on April 23, 1975, interestingly on the same day as Shakespeare’s birthday, although 409 years later.

The first alignment that stands out is his exact Venus-Neptune opposition, expressed so clearly in the angelic and otherworldly tones of Jónsi’s singing voice. This Venus-Neptune opposition is in a T-square with Mars, which brings in the assertive fire that also runs through their music. Furthermore, the Venus-Mars square clearly fits the chart of a musician, a performer bringing the art of music (Venus) to life and action (Mars) upon the stage.

Jónsi has a second T-square in his chart, this one comprised of Jupiter opposite Pluto, each squaring Saturn at the midpoint. Without knowing his birth time it is uncertain whether his Moon is also in this alignment. One can see the expression of this Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto T-square in both the guttural heaviness and the intense grandeur of the music.

The two oppositions that make up these two T-squares in Jónsi’s birth chart, of Venus opposite Neptune and Jupiter opposite Pluto, are also part of another major aspect pattern: the Mystic Rectangle. The two oppositions cross each other, two trines forming two of the sides of the rectangle, and two sextiles forming the other two sides. This remarkable aspect pattern brings together both the dynamic tensions of the two oppositions, with the flowing, harmonious aspects of the trines and sextiles. Thus Jónsi was born with Venus trine Pluto and Venus sextile Jupiter, each lending a greater depth and breadth to the artistic creativity of his music; and he was also born with Jupiter trine Neptune and Neptune sextile Pluto, bringing in the expansive transcendence and mystical power of his music.

A trine of Mars and Saturn also tie the midpoints of the two T-squares together, which can be recognized in the marching, almost militaristic drumbeats that so often punctuate Sigur Rós’s songwriting.

Finally, Jónsi was born with a Sun-Mercury conjunction in a tight opposition to Uranus, reflecting the individual brilliance, creativity, and even genius that he is able to bring forward through his musical performances.

Of course, the complexity of Sigur Rós’s music is also shaped by the natal charts of the other two current band members Georg Hólm and Orri Páll Dyrason, and the past members Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson and Kjartan Sveinsson, but exploring the dynamic interplay of all of their charts is beyond the scope of this essay. However, the band formed in 1994 under the exact Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the last decade of the 20th century, and I could still perceive the archetypal qualities of this alignment in Sigur Rós’s musical style—the blend of flowing, ethereal melody with electronic, technological experimentation, the use of light and flowing imagery, sparkling sunlight dazzling across ocean waves, and the overall feeling of wonder and enchantment running through every aspect of their artistic creation. These Uranus-Neptune qualities of exploratory imagination and mystical play, blending the contemporary with the eternal, have now been brought into dialogue with the titanically revolutionary energies of the current Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto alignment, giving birth to an art form that pushes imagination to its peak, bursting beyond the merely human sphere into a realm of both mystical transcendence and underworldly depth—finally to return to the humble human performers bowing low on a darkened stage, illuminated by the glow of a single, focused spotlight.

Together we will make the case that a Whiteheadian cosmology is not only compatible with archetypal psychology, but provides a metaphysical foundation for key concepts of the latter—such as the collective unconscious, synchronicity, and archetypes—which are otherwise difficult to account for in a materialist view of the cosmos. Whitehead’s cosmology is often described as “panpsychist,” which means that psyche, far from being exclusively human, pervades the cosmos. Those inspired by Jung, we believe, will also find spiritual and intellectual nourishment from Whitehead’s philosophy.

Matt and I will be offering a lecture on Friday evening from 7:00-9:00 pm, and a workshop on Saturday from 10:00 am-1:00 pm. If you are in the Boise area, please see the website of the Idaho Friends of Jung for further details.

For those who are interested, I have several other presentations and events coming up in 2017 and 2018. For information on these engagements please see my Calendar of Events page, which I will continue to keep up to date.

In the North Atlantic there is an island, and it is said that upon this island live two nations: the human nation of Iceland, and a second nation, one that is mysterious and veiled. This is the realm of the Huldufólk, Iceland’s “hidden people.”

This presentation, given at Esalen Institute in the autumn of 2016, offers a glimpse into the world of the Huldufólk and the dynamic landscape in which they live.

The inaugural issue of Immanence: The Journal of Applied Mythology, Legend, and Folktalewill be published in just a few days on October 31, and I am delighted to have my article “The Phenomenology of Astrology” included in the publication! A preview of the issue, which is titled The Mythic Present, is available and includes the table of contents, featured artwork, an article by Keiron Le Grice, and the founding editor Craig Chalquist’s introduction to the journal and its contents. This new journal looks at how myth, legend, and folklore continue to saturate our contemporary lives—an inquiry into which astrology provides a particularly compelling perspective. The practice of astrology allows one to perceive archetypes, which can also be discerned in the world’s mythic traditions, manifesting in human events synchronistically correlated with the movement of the planets. My article for the Immanence journal explores how one can also experience these numinous archetypes when contemplating the celestial bodies of the night sky.

I joined Chris Flisher on his podcast Turning of the Wheelto discuss the current alignment of Saturn and Neptune, and how the archetypal qualities associated with these two planets are correlating with the unfolding 2016 U.S. election. Our conversation also touched on how the Saturn-Neptune archetypal complex is interacting with the expressions of the longer Uranus-Pluto square, and the many ways in which our contemporary moment is reflecting these dynamic energies.

At the panel event celebrating the publication of Issue 5 of the Archai journal, each of the issue’s contributing authors spoke, introducing their articles and discussing the discipline of archetypal cosmology.